To celebrate their 10th birthday Google have brought back their oldest available index dating back to 2001.
posted on Sep 30, 2008 - View this thread

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology.
posted on Aug 21, 2008 - View this thread

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted on Aug 18, 2008 - View this thread

Cuil is a new search engine developed by former Google employees, and claims to index 3x more pages than Google. CNN Money story has the basics. My attempts were met with timeouts.
posted on Jul 28, 2008 - View this thread

Searchme is a search engine that displays results as images of web pages.
posted on Jun 19, 2008 - View this thread

According to ComScore, Google takes 59.8% of search traffic in the US, leaving Yahoo, MSN and smaller players to fight for the scraps. Pretty pie-chart here. Slightly different numbers are available from Compete and Hitwise, but Google still rules the roost.
posted on Apr 17, 2008 - View this thread

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo! The grand old man of Redmond has finally come out of the closet to woo the loveliest lady in Sunnyvale, offering a staggering $44.6 billion in cash or shares. Cash or shares? Wow! Bearing in mind the...ah...disappointments both companies have suffered over the recent past, is this a marriage made in heaven? Or hell?
posted on Feb 1, 2008 - View this thread

If Google was designed for Google.
posted on Oct 16, 2007 - View this thread

DMOZ Editor(s) seeking extortion for continued inclusion is putting further smudge on the "volunteer" directory. Seems lots of folks have had their hands out over inclusion in the DMOZ, so why hasn't a business been built out of it? Is Best of the Web positioning itself as Google Bait?
posted on Aug 28, 2007 - View this thread

Chime.TV -- it's a new video hyper-aggregator (like VodPod) by MeFite chime that I've been using since it was in development. It's Wii-compatible and tested and can turn your fave sites into channels (including but not limited to MeFi,Boing Boing, Digg, or Fark). You can automatically watch any YouTube channel as well, or just watch your favorites. I'm personally going to suggest you try out the Net100 channel, which is an aggregate of everbody's top 10 videos. Flash player required
posted on Jun 12, 2007 - View this thread

Sputtr is a front-end for searching a variety of popular sites, of course dipped in some Web 2.0 sauce.
posted on May 12, 2007 - View this thread

Yahoo! Australia introduces a new search engine that uses OpenSearch and pretty little AJAX tricks to integrate results from Flickr, Wikpedia, YouTube (and so on). You can customize the layout, and even add your own search sources. It’s called Alpha, it’s currently in Beta, and aims to get through the rest of the Greek alphabet by June. (Via podlob.)
posted on Apr 10, 2007 - View this thread

Wikiasari search engine. Wikipedia founder plans to offer a new search engine using "the same network of followers" for the process. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”
posted on Dec 24, 2006 - View this thread

Google Checkout is officially unveiled today; the latest service to join the Google arsenal in their race to control the entire www. It has been suggested in the news that the Google payment service was also a big factor in the recent Yahoo and eBay partnership, since eBay's Paypal service might finally have some real competition. More info on the service here.
posted on Jun 29, 2006 - View this thread

Google Images Censored in China A picture says 1000 words, and Google.cn is censoring them all. Check out the side-by-side screens of a search for "tiananmen+square" in Google.com and Google.cn images. Looks like a nice place, with little historical significance. You can try the search yourself. The text on the bottom left is the censorship disclaimer. Very different than our results. A far cry from Google's claim that they do not censor results. Nice to know that they stand up to the government here but not abroad.

A good spoof of the whole thing.
posted on Jan 30, 2006 - View this thread

Google music search... It had to happen sooner or later, right? Drop in a phrase, you get artist, album, and song title matches to choose from. Choose an artist, you get a list of their albums and on the album page you get a tracklisting and links to buy the album online, as well as links to do other artist/album/song-related Google searches.
posted on Dec 15, 2005 - View this thread

Singing Fish - The search engine for audio and video.
posted on Oct 13, 2005 - View this thread

Yahoo Releases a beta tool that searches for Creative Commons content. It even allows you to specify the type of license you're interested in (derivitive works, commercial use). Lawrence Lessig obviously has something to say about it. If nothing else, it will increase awareness of the cause.
posted on Mar 24, 2005 - View this thread

Microsoft has unleashed their internet search engine to the world. It currently isn't working, at least for me. Is it wrong of me to wish it stays that way?
posted on Nov 11, 2004 - View this thread

Mark Cuban, who obviously just has too much time on his hands, is teaming up with Icerocket in an attempt to thwart Google for search engine dominance.
posted on Aug 3, 2004 - View this thread

blinkx is a new contextual search agent that seems to be causing some excitement. Unfortunately, it is not available for Macintosh or Mozilla at present.
posted on Jul 15, 2004 - View this thread

I found these images, one, two, when I typed in “tent” in the “search all fields” field and selected image as resource type. The site is OAIster, which is a digital library, which has 3,273,233 records from 301 institutions. Its my new magic eight ball. (via)
posted on Jun 20, 2004 - View this thread

Researchers have created a 3D search engine. Sketch the object you're looking for and the search engine will attempt to find it.
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

Mining the Deep Web. Google indexes 4 billion pages, but there are hundreds of billions of documents out there in the Deep Web that are effectively unreachable by search engines because they are locked in databases or are unsearchable media. It looks like Yahoo is going to start giving us a peek by providing unified access to a wide variety of sites that are ordinarily only searchable by their own custom search engines.
posted on Mar 2, 2004 - View this thread

Adult search engine, Booble.com has received a cease and desist order from Google on the grounds of trademark infringement. Read Google's letter and Booble's response. all links are work safe.
posted on Jan 29, 2004 - View this thread

Who gives, who gets... and surprise, Google is on top. I always figured that the search engines had a symbiotic relationship, but playing with this Search Engine Decoder to actually see it is far more entertaining. And, I'd never heard of Overture, but it seems like all the big boys pay them for content. The Decoder is hosted by Search This, which "[provides] search engine optimization and web marketing strategies for the everyday web designer." I guess that's a few of us...
posted on Nov 16, 2003 - View this thread

Amazon as search engine. Is it just me, or does every search on Amazon.com result in 90% results for discontinued items or stuff they don't bother to sell? I'm not very confident.
posted on Sep 25, 2003 - View this thread

Grub: The seti@home of search engines?
According to the New Scientist: "A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week."
Grub has thus launched before HyperBee, a similar distributed search project.
This link was previously posted on MeFi when it was still in the conceptual stage.
The project is being run by LookSmart (along with its own open directory project called zeal) but as the New Scientist article notes: "Website information collected by Grub is already being fed into one of LookSmart's search services, called WiseNut. But the collected data are also freely accessible to the public, so they can be incorporated into any web site or desktop application."
Possible Google competition or doomed from the start?
posted on Apr 21, 2003 - View this thread

Forget BlogChalking. Go by the globe. A (slightly) simpler cousin of the GeoTags search engine (which I could never get useful information from anyway), the GeoURL ICBM Address Server (by Joshua Schachter of Memepool) pegs sites to specific points on the planet via good old-fashioned coordinates and META tags. While the web supposedly has no borders, many sites - like blogs - have a place at their heart, a virtual (if not physical) home. Now you can see if your site has neighbors. [Via Blogdex - More Inside]
posted on Jan 8, 2003 - View this thread

A warning shot in the dark: For connoisseurs of clever turns of phrase: The phrase "a warning shot in the dark" popped out at me from a Google News preview panel as being a mixed metaphor. Indeed, a Google search reveals that the phrase has never before been used on the entire Web, which is rather amazing. Delving into the story, it appears by paragraph three that the mixed metaphors are appropriate, in this case.
posted on Nov 27, 2002 - View this thread

What is MetaFilter?
metafilter is important
metafilter is cool
metafilter is different from most weblogs
metafilter is gone for good
metafilter is boring
metafilter is bad for me
More fun usage of everyone's favourite search engine at www.googlism.com. I myself, am said said to have the highest dispersive mixing capability of any compounder yet. Who knew!?
posted on Nov 3, 2002 - View this thread

Is Google's use of cookies unnecessarily invasive? Daniel Brandt, described by Salon yesterday as Mr. Anti-Google, says Google "has inadequate justification for planting a cookie that expires in 2038 on every user, and also recording that user's search terms, IP number, and time-date." Brandt is the man behind the NameBase conspiracy database (previously discussed here), and also uncovered the CIA's illegal use of cookies last March. He insists that Google's use of cookies, combined with the Patriot Act, allows U.S. authorities to "do a 'sneak and peek' search of a Google user's hard drive when he isn't home, retrieve a Google cookie id, and then get a keyword search history" specific to the user's computer. Oh yeah, he also thinks PageRank is undemocratic.
posted on Aug 30, 2002 - View this thread

Google makes another killer app? Rackmounted servers devoted to googling your own intranet or website. Just look at those specs and features. Google is selling 1 server, retail $28,000, and they are marketing especially for corporate intranets. But imagine the power that would be at the fingertips of archivists, students, and researchers everywhere with a dedicated, customized Google for their own website. Imagine being able to do a detailed search that would literally comb the content of every page published by Project Gutenberg. In seconds, you could call upon thousands of years of writing for any and all information on any specific subject. What kind of implications will this technology have long-term for students, researchers, and archivists?
posted on Aug 21, 2002 - View this thread

BBC funds ad-free, porn-free search engine. Fueled by UK television license fees and Google search technology, the engine doesn't kick out results from paying advertisers. News article here.
posted on May 15, 2002 - View this thread

Teoma takes on Google?
Ask Jeves launched its new search engine yesterday aimed at challenging Google for the best search engine on the web. Teoma offers options to narrow your search using "subject-specific popularity." For example, if someone searched for the name "Bill Clinton," Teoma offers ways to refine your search, showing links to topics related to your search, such as "Clinton Scandal" and "Monica Lewinsky." Will this search engine replace Google as the SE of choice for the Internet savvy? Also, what other search engines do you use?
posted on Apr 2, 2002 - View this thread

Google Catalog Search uses Google technology to search thousands of scanned mail-order catalogs, from industrial adhesives to designer clothing and gourmet food.
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

Blogdexter searches the Blogdex for the URL you feed it and gives you the results. At the Blogdex page. Isn't that what that "url search" link--at the Blogdex--page is for?
posted on Nov 5, 2001 - View this thread

FindSounds.com is your source for on-line sound effects. Their search engine has found and catalogued sounds in several formats. You can search by name, and their spectral analyzer can help you find sounds similar to your search results.
posted on Oct 15, 2001 - View this thread

Sex no longer interesting. "All the major search engines reported that the word 'sex' had fallen out of their top ten search terms for the first time in the web's young history, replaced with the likes of 'BBC' and 'CNN'." (Scroll down to "SARAH LEFT ON INTERNET NEWS".)
posted on Sep 28, 2001 - View this thread

Lasoo, location-based search engine. Really slick. They've improved it a lot since I last visited.
posted on Sep 25, 2001 - View this thread

Google Current Events: Always the innovator, Google's brains make it easier to find news (and archives of news) about all of today's events.
posted on Sep 11, 2001 - View this thread

Lycos Legal - Terms and Conditions This is by far the longest legal agreement I have ever seen for a web site. 15,144 words that would occupy over 31 printed pages. 38 distinct types of prohibited conduct.
posted on Jul 23, 2001 - View this thread

For Sale. Pre-owned Search Engine $250,000,000 o.n.o

Google is hinting at an end of year IPO for a measley $250 million. Is this the beginning of the end of the dot-com crash?. Via The Register.
posted on Jun 25, 2001 - View this thread

Interesting idea, but will it work? "Grub provides a free for download, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time"
posted on May 18, 2001 - View this thread

There's a Japanese portal site named Goo (not to be confused with A Boy Named Goo). I wonder if Goo will merge with the GLE Concern to challenge a certain search engine we all know and love?
posted on Jan 20, 2001 - View this thread

Altavista to become only search engine
Not really, but they do plan on enforcing several search-related patents that they have, hoping to increase revenue by extorting other search companies. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.... If you index a distributed set of databases - what the Internet is - and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents," says CMGI CEO David Wetherell.
posted on Jan 18, 2001 - View this thread

Stuck in the past? Ok, while this is hardly news it's annoying as hell. No matter what I search for, it doesn't pull any articles up after 1/1/2001. What's worse is they don't appear to have ANY contact emails for anyone other then a frustrating "feedback" form. Grrrr. There's got to be other comprehensive live news search sites....
posted on Jan 6, 2001 - View this thread

Isn't this how the IMDB got started? Maybe this guy will eventually be able to sell out. (But to who?)
posted on Oct 30, 2000 - View this thread

Search Engine Northernlight Donating Ad Revenue to Hospital One of my favorite search engines, Northernlight.com, is doing some benefit work -- during the week of October 14th through October 20th, searches on Northern Light will benefit the Duke Children's Hospital. Pretty cool -- and they're a good search engine, too.
posted on Oct 16, 2000 - View this thread

Has Google finally sold out? You may have already seen this via Robot Wisdom - evidence that Google has monkeyed with their search engine to give preference to partner Yahoo!'s pages. I guess it had to happen sooner or later, but I'm sad. Anyone know of a better search engine on the horizon that still has integrity?
posted on Sep 13, 2000 - View this thread